Lock Them Up
A case for jailing the leadership

January 29, 2017

It’s been eighty-two days since a clinically troubled minority decided the best way to proceed, as real Americans, would be to make the rest of us more miserable than they were. While they won the contest, they have yet to make the whole republic as unhappy as they appear to be. But, not for the lack of trying.

But I digress, let’s not talk about the miserable white victim class. Rather, let’s focus on the miserable Republican criminal class – move the discussion up the food chain. (Or one step closer to Dante’s innermost circle, to be more objective.)

(Bear with me while I fly off on a, seemingly wild, tangent.)
When I work as a programmer, if I were to do anything illegal with my programming, like knowingly cause system failure or fraud, that would be a crime. The fact that the illegal actions were performed at work mitigates nothing. Sabotage is sabotage and theft is theft – context is meaningless.

Similarly, any other line of work follows the same generalization. A taxi driver working “get away” for a bank heist is a criminal. An accountant who embezzles from a customer is a criminal. The bush pilot who occasionally runs illegal kinder eggs out of Mexico – criminal. The pattern is clear.

Except for politicians.

For some, suspicious, reason we have institutionalized forgiveness for criminal behavior by our elected employees. Not all bad behavior get a pass; regarding murder, mayhem and alike politicians face the same (wealth weighted) system as the rest of us. But work related stuff is different.

Take gerrymandering as an example. In several states the courts have ruled that Republicans mapped districts in a way that intentionally violates federal law and denies citizens their right to fair representation. The districts were mapped right after the 2010 census, so those voters have been denied their rights for over six years.

The court compelled remedy is for those same Republicans to try again. Since the first illegal mapping yielded a six-year win, nothing compels them to do anything different this time around. They’ll move a few district lines, reprint some ballots, maybe close a few polling places and move on. The cycle will restart with law suits, court appearances and eventually rulings against them. Repeat.

In programming, we call this a closed loop. There is no way out, it goes on forever – or until all resources are exhausted.

But applying the “crime is a crime regardless of work context” generalization could be the way to keep the loop from going infinite and exhausting all resources. When lawmakers intentionally brake work-related laws, how about we treat their crimes like crimes. When they intentionally deny citizen’s civil rights for six year perhaps a six-year prison term could serve as a gentle reminder of equal protection under the law.  After all, Republicans ostensibly dig deterrents, so they should love this idea.

In Peace and Justice,
osv